No what makes this worse is that for 3 years nobody did anything about it.
You know what makes this worse, you download an MP3 and you can get 5 years and or a 250,000$ fine
Let that be a lesson regarding what the legal system really protects.
"Virtual assets are more important to a monetized society then your body, safety and psychological well-being."
I think people should remember criminal offences are offences against the state, not against the individual. This means there's a detachment between the victim and the case. This is essential for any society that wants to work on the basis of the rule of law. Thus the role and responsibility for punishing, rehabilitating and protecting society is also on the state.
I can understand why victims of crime (and everyone else ) believe justice is not done. I'd admit this is natural due to instinctive emotions. Emotions will always play a part when you feel aggrieved. However emotions cloud judgement which results in an irrational response. This is why the state steps in. And as cold this may sound, the length of sentencing should be towards what the judge feels is appropriate to the one tried taking account the seriousness, plea and remorse. There needs to be a complete detachment from the feelings of the victim to have a justice system not a retribution system.
In a healthy person emotions and self-control [or other aspects of decision making] are not at odds with each other.
In culture and religion there's a popular stigma that emotions are to blame for bad decision making. It's b/s and you can find that out by actually using and familiarizing yourself with your own. If somebody becomes flippant and incoherent due to distress or a negative life situation, that distress is the problem, not the fact they have any emotions at all.
A sedate person doesn't always have good judgement either. ( in fact there's an illness where people have committed crimes lacking good or reasonable judgement sans emotions because they just don't have any. ). So I wouldn't count on it. FYI.
I have forgiven people. Well we should try to exterminate evil and not evil people.
There's no such thing as "evil" outside of religious symbology, although I get what you meant / don't want to derail the thread much.
And about the victim being scarred for life --> Have you ever tried forgiving someone for doing you wrong? You and the offender both feel a lot better and I can guarantee you the victim will have a lot less issues to do with the crime later in life.
People that get psychological conditions from being abused don't choose to have them. Thus forgiving the perpetrator isn't going to cure them from it either.
Also in my opinion if she stayed angry or even vengeful at this guy for the rest of her ( or his ) lifetime then she'd have every right to and that's her business.
@
Just Another Gamer: yeah, obviously if you are so stuck up in your opinion, you coultnt see why forgiving actually helps a victim or any kind of crime.
you know why people that got attacked, raped or hit by a random car may live in fear for years? cause for no good reason at all, they are suddenly stuck in the past, setting their mindset so that every waking minute is basically the second before they got attacked, raped or hit by a car. not to say, its their own fault, cause it isnt, but they do trap themselves in a position, where fear and nightmares are unavoidable. therapy can help people escape the initial trap, but thats really just half the process.
Most psychological issues aren't caused by any desire for revenge.
Sometimes repercussions of a crime are permanent and it's not an issue of living in the past, it's an issue of suffering through the present. If some assaulter physically disables you and you go from walking to limping or in a wheel chair for the rest of your life, is that really living in the past? I think I'd feel wronged as well. Forgetting about it isn't going to return your life to a past/former state so I don't see that as a step forwards, really.
Also the psychological scars may be more of a wake-up call to reality, you can naively believe for example that 'god be in his kingdom and alls right with the world', right up until the bullet hits, then all of a sudden its hard to say that because you know the world is a hellhole and you have to wake up to a different reality or a forced acknowledgement of that fact.
I think something as simple as having a crime committed against someone (depending on its exact nature) can take their entire life away by virtue of the psychological harm it does. Not everybody is the same and if you think you are above that, well that's good but that isn't likely applicable to everybody.
This times 1 million. Nice post.
'Taking out your anger' on someone by wanting them locked up in jail for
the rest of their life (actually stop a second and think about that, 20 years of your life, that you only get once, gone. Wasted. I very much doubt you are appreciating how bad that actually is. Hell, even 3 years is a long time) is REVENGE. No matter how you try to put it over, that is without doubt revenge. And revenge is a horrible thing - it turns perfectly normal people into monsters; dedicating their entire existence (again, what a waste of a life) to hating one person (thus the offender is still winning in this case) and paranoid that something is always going to be lurking around the corner.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, is a wonderful (though it shouldn't be necessary in the first place) thing. Why else would 98% of the population of the ENTIRE WORLD (the other 2% seemingly located in this thread) teach and follow it in their religion?
Say, for example, your best friend at school decided to nick something of yours one day. Now, if you decided to hate him, punch him in the face and call the teachers you'd not only ruin his (and your) school life by making the rest of the school hate him too but you would also lose a close friend. Then you spend the rest of your school days devoted to hating your ex-friend, all the while not realising that he has moved on and you yourself in all your hate do not have any friends.
If you had chosen to just say "Hey, it's no big deal, just ask to borrow it next time OK?". It'd all be over in a matter of minutes (OK, there'd probably be a bit of an argument at first). But you'd still have your best friend, and everything would be so much better than if you'd decided to take revenge on him.
But don't worry, I don't expect half of you to understand this concept, for as a great person once said:
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
-Mahatma Gandhi
You wouldn't want to take a productive working member of society that's 'not all bad' that has made a error of judgement and then throw them in a cell and by the time they're out they're no longer a productive member of society anymore for various reasons. Just being in closed quarters with other hardened criminals is probably not good for anyone environmentally, psychologically etc. I wouldn't wish that onto anyone for even a week, never mind 3 years. Just saying.
People that want somebody dead for committing a crime, in general I think have their heads screwed on backwards at least just as much as the ones committing the crimes in the first place.
Having said that I think the arguments here are are kind of b/s. Revenge was a popular religious commandment for thousands of years too, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Ignorant and unhelpful it may be, it spread as well as any other religion in its time. Human stupidity itself is a pretty popular trait! So just coming up with numbers of how many people practice it doesn't really convince me of anything.
It's easy for people to spit out words like forgiveness
before they're the ones victimized by a crime, especially if they've lived privileged enough to not see a lot of crime or know how much of a problem it can be if you don't do anything about it to prevent it. When I hear words like that they just come across as plastic and sound more like a justification to be lazy, slothful, apathetic and do nothing about an injustice when it happens.
There are some situations in which forgiveness is appropriate or beneficial and in others it just isn't.
As for your example: You're talking about an object versus a human being getting abused for several years without anyone doing anything about it, while the perpetrator knew what they were doing was wrong, yet committed the act, not just once, but over and over and over again. Doesn't sound like a realistic comparison to me.
Please don't quote dead people like Ghandi. If you understand your own arguments show it by talking about your own ideas yourself. I'm as much of a proponent of some the things he supported as anyone like non-conflict and non-violence but none of these things are above using your intellect. Sometimes the wisest thing to do is not retaliate because it's only going to allow some conflict to snowball out of proportion. Sometimes the wisest thing to do is to stamp out a problem immediately so it doesn't grow out of control any further, because you WILL have more conflict to deal with unless you do something about it in the immediate that prevents that from happening. That's why one of the things the legal system will be interested in is his supposed remorse or at least his likeliness to recommit the offense against anyone. I think we would all be upset if we just forgot and forgave his transgressions and then he went out and did the same thing to another young girl/anyone else's child. Maybe this is blowing things out of proportion and he's not corrupt to that extent but that's something for the legal process to decide, not anyone here.